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W e’re in the early stages of an unstoppable trend that will transform your daily commute. You’ll never have to drive to work again... You won’t have to deal with a never-ending parade of brake lights anymore. You’ll be able to finish the book you’ve been reading for weeks... catch up on dozens of e-mails before you get to the office... or help your kids finish their homework on the way to the bus stop. And it’s a lot closer to happening than you might think... For example, carmaker Audi just announced a new model A8 – with “Level 3” autonomy. Level 3 means hardly any attention is required to control the car. It basically drives on its own... And the driver doesn’t have to be ready to intervene in an emergency. When this model goes on sale next year, it’ll make history as the most highly automated car on the road. Moreover, Audi is aiming for Level 4 vehicles by 2020. This means driver attention is never required.
The path to get to Level 4 depends on one company... And the real story in self-driving cars is what’s going on inside the car. You see, self-driving cars originally needed to “memorize” both maps and how to use a car’s controls – how to accelerate, steer, and brake. But it would have taken programmers a long time – some estimates say up to 100 years – to teach a car every scenario. Nobody was going to wait a century for this technology... Thankfully, one company has developed a breakthrough way for these self- driving cars to quickly learn on their own. This company is best known for making graphics cards – a special kind of silicon chip that works alongside a central processing unit chip with the goal of creating images, especially in video games. The trick to this is a kind of computing called “parallel processing,” where lots of little math problems are all done at once... like coloring each portion of a digital picture.
One company has developed
a breakthrough way for these self-driving cars to quickly learn on their own.
American Consequences | 39
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